Wednesday, May 11, 2016

The Alexander Trio in a Holocaust Day concert at the Jerusalem Music Centre

The Alexander Trio – Nitai Zori-violin, Ella Toovey-‘cello
and Michal Tal-piano - performed at a Holocaust Day concert at the Jerusalem
Music Centre, Mishkenot Sha’ananim on May 5th 2016. Formed in 2013,
the trio is named in memory of violinist Alexander Tal (1932-2005), father of
Michal Tal. Alexander Tal was among the most prominent Israeli musicians in the
1960s and early ‘70s, a founder of the New Israeli Quartet and the Israeli
Chamber Ensemble. The Alexander Trio
performs at festivals in Israel and overseas, in the Felicja Blumental Centre concert
series and records for the Voice of Music, Israeli radio. In addition to the
large piano trio repertoire, the Alexander Trio performs works written for it,
also collaborating with other artists.

The Holocaust Memorial Day concert opened with “Suite in Memoriam”
(1947) for piano trio by Yitzhak Edel (1896-1973). Born in Poland to a Hassidic
family, Edel spent two years in Russia, where he became acquainted with the
work of the Society for Jewish Folk Music. Back in Warsaw in 1922, he engaged
in music education (for three years, he taught at the Janusz Korczak Orphanage)
and established the Company for Jewish Music. Edel immigrated to Palestine in 1929, settling
in Tel Aviv, where he taught, conducted choirs and composed. The Alexander
Trio’s playing of “Suite in Memoriam”, a work which is rich in Jewish melodies
and sentiment, brought out the vibrancy of Edel’s scoring with its sad
undertones, giving its moving solos and duets personal expression.Referring to the work he dedicated to the
Polish victims of the Holocaust, Edel wrote: “I did not attempt here to express
the terrible tragedy which took place in the 20th century in the
heart of Europe. I attempted only to preserve the sounds inseparably bound to
the spiritual life of millions of men, women and children who were cruelly
slaughtered, suffocated and burnt by barbaric murderers for their only one and
only unforgivable crime – that of being Jews”.

Born in Moravia, pianist, composer, writer and educator
Gideon Klein (1919-1945) was a person of prodigious skills, writing music in a
number of styles, composing some 25 works and writing song arrangements. In
1941, he was deported to Terezin, where he remained for three years. There he taught,
performed, served as pianist for several opera productions and composed. Gideon
Klein perished in Auschwitz. Until 1990, it was thought that the works Klein
wrote prior to his internment were lost until a suitcase was found containing
all the works he had written before the war, revealing experimental works
composed in the most contemporary styles of the time. The manuscript of the Duo
for violin and ‘cello (1941) was one of the works preserved in the suitcase; Klein
had not managed to complete it. Ella Toovey and Nitai Zori gave a committed
reading of the work, displaying the opening Allegro con fuoco movement’s
intense, atonal moments reinforced with its bowed ‘cello tremolos, double
stopping and pizzicato, interesting rhythmic shifts and clashing harmonies,
then minimal moments in which the violin plays a ghostly melody and the
enigmatic final major chord. In the Lento movement the artists, each instrument
playing its own agenda, recreate the profound, convincing and soul-searching
mood piece. The music then suddenly cuts out, poignantly symbolizing the premature
termination of the composer’s life. Gideon Klein’s legacy has been preserved by
several musicians, but primarily by his sister pianist and music educator
Eliška Kleinová (1912-1999).

We then heard the violin and piano setting of “Kaddish” (the
Jewish prayer for the dead, sung in Aramaic) the first of two pieces from
Maurice Ravel’s “Deux mélodies hébraïques” composed in 1941 originally for
voice and piano.Zori’s masterly and
finely crafted evocation of the melismatic, cantorial style had the audience
following every nuance of the melodic and emotional course as Tal gave
sensitive expression to the spare, marvellously coruscant utterances of Ravel’s
piano text.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No.2 in E-minor opus 67 was
completed in the spring of 1944; its emotional agenda arises from both national-
and personal tragedy. After several years of brutal war, Russia was emerging to
realize the reality of the death camps and fate of the Jews. At this time, Shostakovich
also lost his closest friend – music writer and linguist Ivan Sollertinsky.
Bereft at the unexpected death at 42 of his “ideal friend”, “mentor” and “alter
ego”, the composer dedicated the trio to his memory. Four days after Sollertinsky’s
death, Shostakovich completed the first movement. The Alexander Trio gave a
gripping and involved performance of the E-minor Trio, with attention to the
fine detail of its unique motifs, to questions of balance and to the work’s
almost unbroken intensity. From the bleak, ghostly and ever shocking opening of
its main theme in muted ‘cello harmonics, to the pensive piano theme, to a
sinister waltz, the artists showed the audience at the Music Centre through the
work’s desolate soundscape. Following their frenetic playing of the brash, unrelenting,
wild-natured and sarcastic second movement, the third movement opens with- and
is dominated by fateful, crashing, fate-filled chords, the tragic, beautiful
melodies played out by violin and ‘cello heartrending and moving. With its
reference to former motifs and themes, we also hear new melodies in the fourth
movement – Russian folk melodies and a Jewish tune -with Zori’s strident violin comments set
against powerful ‘cello utterances and expressive piano melodies. And there is much to be expressed in the opus
67; the Alexander Trio’s playing of it was profound on all levels, perhaps not
for the faint-hearted, but more than rewarding. Shostakovich’s interest in
Jewish music goes back earlier than 1944. He wrote:” It seems I comprehend what
distinguishes the Jewish melos. A cheerful melody is built…on sad intonations…”
The characteristic combination of tragedy and cheer, of irony, beauty and
despair of Jewish music is also present in Shostakovich’s music and nowhere
more pointedly than in the E-minor Trio.